Klarinet Archive - Posting 000094.txt from 1998/05

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Clarinet Specific?
Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 06:35:13 -0400

At 01:15 AM 5/4/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Several years ago, when I was an apartment dweller, I had difficulty in
>practicing my clarinet because of neighbor hostility. (I don't think that
>it was the quality of my playing, but rather just the fact that I was
>playing at all.) Practically everytime that I played, the neighbor in the
>apartment below would bounce a basketball off his ceiling. I tried to work
>around this by incorporating the 'bounces' with metronome settings, but
>they just weren't even enough. In desperation, I would go to a shopping
>center's parking lot and park far away from other cars.....

Great story. I'm lucky I am the only tenant in a building with a
restaurant and auto detailing place downstairs. Nobody's raised any hell
yet, even when I squeak:-).

I think it was Sonny Rollins who hauled his tenor sax out on either the
Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge back in the early 1960s and played far into
the night. Initially, I think, it had something to do with not wanting to
disturb the pregnant woman downstairs by practicing for hours at a time.
Then it became something of a meditative experience.

One of my unforgettable moments was sitting in a ground floor office in the
State University of New York at Binghamton in May 1970, up all night
writing a late grad school paper, and hearing some guy out in the parking
lot playing an alto sax. Haunting sound.

In any case...you could have asked the guy to bounce the basketball in
exact time and borrowed him as a metronome:-).

Ken

"The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water
connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone called it a river.
They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things."
--Peter Quinn, "Banished Children of Eve"
Ken Wolman kwolman@-----.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649

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